Browsing Posts tagged Animal studies

Animals have no consciousness. Animals have no language. Animals have no emotions. Animals have no memories. (Well, except maybe elephants.)

The Nisshin Maru, a Japanese whaling factory ship hauling in a minke whale, 1992--Culley/Greenpeace

It is a constant source of amazement—but a gladdening one—to me that the orthodoxies I was taught in college, as a student of linguistics and an animal lover, have been so thoroughly overthrown in just the last 30-odd years. We know that animals of all kinds have powerful systems of communication, adaptations essential to survival and the good life—and more, that animals seem to revel in talking with one another. We have a growing sense of the complexity of animal minds, now that we have stopped thinking of animals as automata. We know something of animal emotions, and not just the tender ones of elephants, and even of how animals perceive the world and are self-aware of their places in it.

Much of this knowledge figures in the emerging field of “animal studies,” which is very much different from the animal husbandry of yore—or at least my grad-school days. As James Gorman writes in a recent New York Times article, the discipline is moving from the science laboratory into social science and humanities classrooms (and, indeed, a whole humanities curriculum could be designed around animals, from Odysseus’s dog to Rembrandt’s version of Balaam’s donkey to Steven Spielberg’s film version of War Horse). As Mark Bekoff, a pioneering scholar, remarks, the field embraces “anything that has to do with the way humans and animals interact.” Think of it as a branch of ecology, inclusive and with grown-up attitudes about the world. continue reading…

"Service Animal" Scammers (New Yorker): An increasing number of your neighbors have been keeping company with their pets in human-only establishments simply by claiming that the creatures are their licensed companion animals and are necessary to their mental well-being.